Two Thumbs Up for All the Gloves at New York Fashion Week

Why are gloves the accessory of the moment? GARAGE investigates.

Around 476 BCE, the king of Sparta accepted a bribe from an enemy army: a gauntlet filled to the brim with silver, which he tried to conceal by sitting on it. He was discovered, exiled, and his home was razed to the ground. In the 13th century, in the midst of concern over decadence in Christian dress, the clergy was banned from wearing red, green, or striped gloves; and, according to legend, when one chilly saint rejected a pair of gloves that had been offered to her, the mitts hovered in midair for an hour, signaling divine approval for her self-control.

Fast-forward to New York Fashion Week 2018 and designers are seeking escape in excess: drugs, Sprawling Banquets, and 1980s indulgence abound. And if you’ve already discarded asceticism for sequined bolo ties or a cornucopia of hallucinogens, you certainly can’t be blamed for picking up a nice pair of mittens and creating a warm boundary between your fingertips and the biting frost. Carpe cestos: go ahead, it’s cold, take the damn gloves.

Raf Simons. Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In his Fall 2018 collection, Raf Simons showed long latex gloves, slickly shiny as an oil spill. The gloves were bunched around the elbows, with a plastic case on an watchband snug around the wrist: a mini-minaudière that resembled a mirrored cigarette case, a pillbox, or, at best, an itty-bitty first aid kit, on hand for emergencies and cravings. The blend of fetish-inspired evening wear and druggy neurosis was a heady one, linking the freewheeling luxury binge with its pragmatic but equally fanatical twin: wellness micromanagement.

Gloves are like hands, birds, or the ocean: they come in all shapes and sizes, and anyone who tells you that they have one fixed position in our beautiful, intricate lexicon of symbols is lying. They’re an emblem, alternately, for evil heiresses who skin nice dogs, vaudevillians, ladies who lunch, entertaining mice, prizefighters. So if the glove renaissance means anything, it’s a return of the character study rather than of a particular character, a way of dressing up and drawing the outlines of the type you're pretending to be.

One might see a harbinger of glovecraft's revival in Jacquemus’s La Main dress, sold on SSENSE for a few golden and fleeting months in 2016 before it disappeared into the ether of designer consignment e-stores. The dress is a giant navy glove. Your head sticks out the wrist, and the fingers fan into a skirt. It’s a visual pun, and an idiotically blunt one, at that: here’s the thing you wear to cover your hands, but now it’s covering your body. But maybe that’s how you throw down the gauntlet.